JLL arranges Lavaca Plaza sale to Riverside in downtown Austin

JLL Capital Markets arranged the sale of Lavaca Plaza to Riverside, according to the announcement carried by Institutional Real Estate, Inc. The notice names neither a price nor the seller for the 122,042-square-foot, 11-story building at 504 Lavaca St. in downtown Austin — so a CBD office sale that closes without a published number leaves the market without a comp to argue over.

Seven of those eleven floors are parking, which the announcement calls one of the highest parking ratios in downtown Austin, and only four carry office space in a range of suite sizes. Built in 1981 at Fifth and Lavaca, the building has a walk score of 99, blocks from the Second Street District, the Sixth Street Entertainment District and Lady Bird Lake's more than ten miles of hiking and biking trails. JLL sizes the immediate surroundings at more than two million square feet of retail, 6,700 hotel keys and 4,300 residential units.

That inventory is the marketing, and it points at the underwrite: a corner in a walkable CBD with structured parking stacked under the workspace. Any per-square-foot metric struck on the full 122,042 square feet is counting garage as much as office, and the announcement does not break out how the area divides between the two. It also supplies no occupancy figure, no rent roll and no capital plan, so whether Riverside bought stabilized space or a repositioning remains unconfirmed.

Office is clearing asset by asset, with commodity sales marking the floor and trophy refinancings marking the top. A 1981 building with a dominant garage component and a strong address sits somewhere inside that spread, and a private price will not tell anyone where. The same silence surrounded the all-cash Vista strip sale in September, which left its format's clearing level private; the trades get reported, the numbers stay with the parties.

The broker's cadence is public even when the price isn't: JLL Capital Markets has appeared in 30 stories in PRED's records as of Sept. 27, with four items logged between Sept. 21 and Sept. 24 — three closings and an announcement, one of them a $17 million close. What remains open is whether Lavaca Plaza's number surfaces and whether a building whose floors are mostly ramp and deck prices nearer a garage than an office tower.